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Boom Boom Boom, Out Go The Lights!!
As most of you know (all three or four of you?), I have revived “The Lunch Menu”, and have pledged to try and come out with a new one on a weekly basis. Of course, this requires a new subject every week, and I had been planning on delving into the past thirty years for the most part. However, the events of this past Thursday have made that unnecessary.
Thursday morning started out in a semi-normal hectic fashion, since I had to go check a system in a police car in Allentown, NJ, a city with no distinction whatsoever except its proximity to Six Flags Great Adventure. It took approximately 1-¼ hours to make the 42-mile trip due to the traffic at exit 7a on the Turnpike. Allentown may be NJ’s answer to Mayberry. The police department is located in the basement of the Allentown Municipal Building, which is hard to miss since it looks like every other non-descript old house on Main St. While Barney Fife is not on the force, they do have the only officer I have ever come across with metallic gold hair. They have something like three or four cars plus and SUV. After I finished there in the early afternoon, I noticed that there was even more traffic heading towards 7a. Fortunately, I was on the other side. I stopped at home to change and call off. I was considering spending the rest of the day at home, but I wound up heading back to the home office at East Rutherford, close by Giants’ Stadium.
Nothing unusual happened until a little after 4 PM, when the lights flickered on and off a few times, finally going out all together. This is really nothing unexpected on a hot summer day. However, the power kept on going on and off repeatedly, at which time we decided to shut down all of the servers. Finally, around 4:45, the power came back on, and stayed on for about 30 minutes. We decided to turn the servers back on. Of course, as soon as they had been back online for about 5 minutes the power went out again, at which point we shut them down for the day. By this time we heard that the problem was occurring all over the Northeast, and not just at 187 East Union Ave, East Rutherford, NJ 07073. The next item on the agenda was getting home, which normally can be excruciating, but is something I have become numb to over time. Now the question was to guess which route home had the least possibility of delay and non-operable traffic lights. The first obvious step was to take the back streets around the stadium, a right turn only route, to avoid the light on Rt. 17 South. This was completed successfully. There was no significant traffic getting on the Turnpike either. According to the radio, the problems seemed to involve any major highway with traffic lights, or limited access roads with off-ramps with lights. My trip home took less time than usual, and it also turned out that Middlesex County had escaped most of the blackout. When I opened the door I found my computer was still on as I had left it, which meant there had been no interruption of power.
Friday, I went into work as usual, since the Governor’s advice to stay home apparently didn’t apply to us. While I had no problem with power, someone I work with who lives in Northern NJ was still without power at 9:30 AM. Compared to the outage in 1965, and the one in 1977, which I can’t really recall, this was mostly a non-event personally. The one outage I remember more distinctly was one following a hurricane in the summer of 1976, I remember this, since the band I was in played that night in Mt. Holly, about 50 miles South that night, and the management insisted we come in. The drive down was interesting, with my ’67 Chevy II Nova SS hydroplaning here and there, and a really torrential downpour. Essentially, as the hurricane was heading North p the NJ coast, I was heading to the South South-West. By the time I arrived there, the hurricane was at it’s peak to the East. Not too many customers that night, but one absolutely drenched guy wondered in with the rain who had been at Long Beach Island. By the time we finished, the tail end of the storm was a bit to the North and I was essentially following in it’s tracks. When I got home (Edison, NJ), I found - Yes, you guessed correctly - no electricity. This wasn’t any major interruption, but it wasn’t restored until the morning
Well, while the outage Thursday didn’t effect me personally, we did have a couple of incidents in this neighborhood that made the national news. The first involved an explosion on a gasoline barge which had everyone wondering about terrorism, and the second involved a gas line explosion at a Laundromat about six blocks from here - and BTW, do you know that MS Word automatically capitalizes “Laundromat”? The latter was interesting since some of the local streets were blocked, and I saw a number of trucks from TV stations on the streets. Then there was also the day I saw two trailers of Budweiser Clydesdales being escorted out of the neighborhood by the police, a truly impressive site. I guess they were lost. The Perth Amboy police had done the same for Johnny Cash many years ago. I may write a song about the Laundromat in which the protagonist goes to a local Bistro while his clothes are drying, and returns to discover the Laundromat is no more due to an unfortunate explosion:
I came back too late, Now my clothes are floating by the interstate. I’ve got nothing to lose, I’ve got the Ex-plo-ding Laundromat Blues!
That’s it for now. Have Fun
E. Clifford Colton
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